Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Kangaroo Crossing

Last year, my friend Mick saw a kangaroo over on Orange Street.

It was about 4 am on Tuesday night. Mick and Thomas had been out drinking together; I had to stay home because I had to teach in the morning. They had closed down the bar and come back to our house, then around 4, Mick decided to walk home. Thomas and I were asleep in bed when the phone rang. It was Mick, yelling that there was a Kangaroo in his yard. A smallish kangaroo.

I rolled over. "That's a wallaby," I said.

"Very funny, Mick," said Thomas and hung up.

"Do you think there's really a kangaroo over there?" I asked.

"No. Mick's just drunk."

"But if there were a kangaroo, and I didn't get out bed to see it, I would be seriously pissed," I said.

Thomas assured me that there was no kangaroo and I went back to sleep.

In the morning, Mick told us that when he was walking home, two thuggish guys ahead of him kept talking about a kangaroo. Mick said they had spent the evening chasing it from yard to yard. He said he saw it in the alley beside his house. He also said that the kangaroo was wearing a collar and had a huge erection.

Now, Mick has a history of saying and believing some crazy stuff, so we didn't know what to think. But we kept telling the story and making him tell it, because we thought it was funny. A few weeks later, Mick claimed to have seen the kangaroo in the neighborhood again. This time, he said, it was trapped under a laundry basket and a crackhead tried to sell it to him for 25 dollars.

This was just getting too outlandish. But then Mick's wife stepped in, a very reliable person, and said that although she did not go outside to see the kangaroo on the first night, she could hear people in the alley talking about it through her open bedroom window.

Huh. Was everyone playing an elaborate joke? Was this a funny story that just got out of hand?

Then our friend Steve Vernon said that he talked to Mick's neighbors who said that, in fact, some girl who lived in the neighborhood was a model and had a wallaby that she had gotten from some foreign photo shoot. The neighbors said further that it had escaped several times.

1.Wouldn't it be illegal to keep that kind of exotic pet? Don't you need some kind of license for that?

2. If a crackhead offered to sell you a kangaroo for 25 dollars, wouldn't you buy it?

There seems to be no shortage of odd creatures and creature incidents in this town. Just last week or the week before, a 12 foot alligator was struck crossing Market Street. What? Yep... just strolling across when it was struck and killed - 290 lbs or something.

I would definitely have gone out of my way to see a kangaroo. I mean, how could you not.